Hotel by Production
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Hotel by Production
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First Presented at NAiD '96
Final Release 6/13/96
Requirements:
Pentium-100 (fast 486 will work though)
Any Sound Card supported by DMP 3.01
612k+ base memory (the more the better)
Emm386 (or some other memory manager)
a REALLY open mind =>
I think I need to explain this demo....
(Believe it or not, we weren't aiming for first place. => )
Chapter I (the concept)
A group of people from Maryland and Virginia went to NAiD together. This
large group was compossed of Mindware, 3 Some, and Terraformer. The night
before NAiD started we all had our computers set up in our 2 hotel rooms
(except for Miss Saigon who spent the night at Phoenix's house) and I
(Tronster) decided to pull the crap routines we all had laying around our
hard drives and stick it into a demo. Kiwi Dog suggest Hotel since we were
at one, and that's how the demo was started.
Chapter II (the gathering)
Once at NAiD we all got a room together along with a few extra people. Two
of them being Mr. Data and Perisoft who each helped to contribute to the
final product. We had alot of routines and because of time only 70% of them
got in. So I spent all my time the first day/night at NAiD throwing stuff
together so that Moby Disk and Kneebiter (both from 3 Some who came in first
with their 100k intro Dyslexia) could link all of our exes together and use
Demo VT as our music player. That didn't happen.
Chapter III (the crunch)
Demos were due at 9:00pm Saturday. It seems many other groups were finishing
their demos so we left our machines and annoyed the NAiD officals to give
us all an extension for Midnight. We got it. Moby Disk had a copy of almost
everything on his system by 11:30pm (except for the music Darkwolf and Fred
were constantly trying to improve...even though both pieces sounded great
already). From past experience I had a feeling Demo VT was going to be
evil to Moby, and it was. Moby pulled Trixter in who helped out alot but
there was now 15 minutes left till the deadline.
Chapter IV (the kludge)
Knowing the demo wouldn't link all together I quickly looked for my smalled
commerical s3m player with a ton o command line options. DMP looked good
(although was very big) and so I wrote some crazy batch files, hoping the
demo exes would work with DMP and DOS's average 600k base memory.
Chapter V (the being told not to run down the halls by security)
At 11:59pm we began pkzipping the file. It was bigger than one disk. Got
two disks and at 12:00am began pkzipping. At 12:02am Moby Disk and I ran
(and then fast walked) to the table. The guy said it was past deadline. We
cried, threatened, offered Miss Saigon for sexual favors, and finally he
just broke down and took it.
Chapter VI (the many errors)
Once back in the room we all watched the 'demo' on my system. Realized it
didn't execute the last part, then Moby Disk and I found out the swimming
pool was closed so I went to bed.
Chapter VII (the rude awakening)
I planned to sleep till 11:45am and then get to the main room to watch the
demo compo. At 10:00am someone (I think Fred) woke me up waving the two
disks I had turned in. He told me because the end of demo executed an
infinite loop (I used :a goto a) we had until 11am to fix it. Seems only
3 of the many demos turned in actually worked so everyone had an hour to
make their demos work. I woke everyone in the room and began a' patching.
The musicians again worked on revising their music, I fixed the timing, and
Mr. Data did something to his scroller. It was the turned in.
Chapter VIII (the viewing)
Timing was good on the Pentium-100 (works on my 486dx2-66 but is a bit slow).
Unfortunitly two bad things happened. My 3d scroller uses a weird x-lib
resolution and the projecter couldn't sync to it, and they didn't run the
correct setup so it crashed before the credits (it needs lot's o' base
memory).
[][][] Example config.sys this works 100% with [][][]
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM HIGHSCAN
BUFFERS=10
FILES=10
DOS=UMB
LASTDRIVE=E
DOS=HIGH
STACKS=0,0
[][][] Example autoexec.bat this works 100% with [][][]
@set ULTRASND=220,1,1,7,5
@set ULTRADIR=C:\ULTRASND
@set BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T1
@set ULTRA16=32c,0,0,1,0
@C:\ULTRASND\ULTRINIT.EXE -dj
@C:\ULTRASND\ULTRAMIX.EXE
rem ignore the above line if you don't use the ultramix
rem version of ultrinit
Some kludges used:
-batch files to link everything
-dmp as the s3m player
-using aaplay and FLIs for a part of the demo
-using a PCX for each name in the credits
Thanx to all of the people who contributed to this 'demo'.
(This version would have been patched with Demo VT or Midas but Moby Disk is
too busy finishing the final release of their intro).
Tronster of Mindware
tronster@sub-zero.mit.edu
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